Porchball

We had just come off one of the most memorable years in American history. Our boys were dying by the thousands in the jungles of Vietnam and the war protests were rocking our world. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy rocked it even more. Our cities were being torn apart by riots, and then 1969 slung off ‘68 like a skater in a roller derby.
The Mets and Jets won their respective titles in 1969, two unbelievable victories almost impossible to imagine. Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick happened in 1969, as did the SDS campus takeovers at Columbia and Harvard, along with the Charles Manson murders. Most memorably, our boys were still coming home from Vietnam in body bags, and the new President Nixon talked peace while the hippies stoned themselves out on pot and LSD while positioning the counter-culture as the alternative to “The Establishment.”
Brownie wrote his own history in 1969: he smoked his first joint, and got laid, both of those momentous events taking place in the sun and the mud at Woodstock. He also matriculated at Alliance College in Schenectady, New York, in September of that year, the unrest of the times serving as a confusing backdrop for an innocent teenager growing up in a not-so-innocent era.
There was no war in Schenectady, but people died, and Detective Michael Gravachevsky watched it happen. A fraternity house cook at Alliance fronted the evil crime network Gravachevsky had run into head-on, and here the lives of two boys from the Berkshires in Massachusetts, Brownie and his best friend Badge, become inextricably tangled in Dandy Don’s web of crime, bribery, depravity, and degradation. One of the boys takes the high road, the other doesn’t. From professors to ballplayers to strippers, Dandy Don ruins the lives of everyone he touches.
Porchball is a book that that deals with loyalty, betrayal, and deception, all twisted together as the characters’ lives are funneled into a single situation where the only common goal is to stop Dandy Don at all costs. Ultimately, it’s the code by which the game of Porchball is played that rises above all other of life’s principles. When a fraternity brother explains that no one cheats at the game, Brownie doesn’t quite understand. The answer is quite simple: “Everyone is taken at their word,” says the fraternity brother, “and everyone does the right thing.”